Better performance
- User-defined routines are optimized.
When you put your custom routines in the database server, the query optimizer can calculate when to run them during queries.
- Indexes increase query speed.
Indexes, created with secondary access methods, can efficiently find and compare values. Secondary access methods build and manipulate index structures on data. With your Informix database server, you can create indexes on data that cannot be sorted in a standard relational database. You can implement your data as extended data types and create functional indexes to speed sorting. A functional index sorts information about the data, instead of the data itself.
For example, if your data is images, you can index features of the images. Then, when you run a query to match an image, the index runs much faster than comparing the binary files of each image.
- Network traffic is reduced.
When you use user-defined routines and other extensibility features, you perform more processing on the data within the database server. Therefore, you send less data to the client application.